“True; but there my Fate helped me. It was before I had come to my full growth--before the last famine but three (by the Right and Left of Gunga, how full used the streams to be in those days!). Yes, I was young and unthinking, and when the flood came, who so pleased as I? A little made me very happy then. The village was deep in flood, and I swam above the Ghaut and went far inland, up to the rice-fields, and they were deep in good mud. I remember also a pair of bracelets (glass they were, and troubled me not a little) that I found that evening. Yes, glass bracelets; and, if my memory serves me well, a shoe. I should have shaken off both shoes, but I was hungry. I learned better later. Yes. And so I fed and rested me; but when I was ready to go to the river again the flood had fallen, and I walked through the mud of the main street. Who but I? Came out all my people, priests and women and children, and I looked upon them with benevolence. The mud is not a good place to fight in. Said a boatman, ‘Get axes and kill him, for he is the Mugger of the ford.’ ‘Not so,’ said the Brahmin. ‘Look, he is driving the flood before him! He is the godling of the village.’ Then they threw many flowers at me, and by happy thought one led a goat across the road.” “How good--how very good is goat!” said the Jackal. “Hairy--too hairy, and when found in the water more than likely to hide a cross-shaped hook. But that goat I accepted, and went down to the Ghaut in great honour. Later, my Fate sent me the boatman who had desired to cut off my tail with an axe. His boat grounded upon an old shoal which you would not remember.” “We are not ALL jackals here,” said the Adjutant. “Was it the shoal made where the stone-boats sank in the year of the great drouth--a long shoal that lasted three floods?” “There were two,” said the Mugger; “an upper and a lower shoal.” “Ay, I forgot. A channel divided them, and later dried up again,” said the Adjutant, who prided himself on his memory. “On the lower shoal my well-wisher’s craft grounded. He was sleeping in the bows, and, half awake, leaped over to his waist--no, it was no more than to his knees--to push off. His empty boat went on and touched again below the next reach, as the river ran then. I followed, because I knew men would come out to drag it ashore.” “And did they do so?” said the Jackal, a little awe-stricken. This was hunting on a scale that impressed him. “There and lower down they did. I went no farther, but that gave me three in one day--well-fed manjis (boatmen) all, and, except in the case of the last (then I was careless), never a cry to warn those on the bank.” “Ah, noble sport! But what cleverness and great judgment it requires!” said the Jackal.